Main menu

Welcome to my personal website. This is largely a holding site with background information about me and my ongoing projects, rather than something frequently updated. More information about those projects can be found on the Inequality and About Me pages. The About Me page also has my contact details in case you want to...

Experts have clashed over whether Wellington should emulate Auckland and amalgamate its local councils, in a public seminar jointly hosted by Victoria University’s Institute for Governance and Policy Studies and the Centre for Accounting, Governance and Taxation Research. Introducing the debate, Graham Sansom, an adjunct professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, noted that...

I was at a conference recently about co-operatives and their role in the twenty-first century, and heard something interesting from Girol Karacaoglu, the Treasury’s chief economist. Karacaoglu, who used to run what is now the Co-operative Bank and has been a big supporter of this conference, was chairing a session entitled ‘Cooperatives as an...

Novel community-based methods of delivering public services can have the “perverse incentive” of replacing paid public sector staff with volunteers. That was the message of a lecture delivered by Dr Jonathan Scott, head of the Centre for Strategy and Leadership at Teesside University (UK), in a lecture to the Institute for Governance and Policy...

New Zealand is likely to face increased concentrations of wealth, inequality and power in the twenty-first century, according to newly assembled data. Economist Geoff Bertram, in a lecture to the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, where he is a senior associate, said data he had assembled showed New Zealand fitted the pattern of...

Guy Standing’s 2011 book, The Precariat, made headlines by identifying what he called “a new dangerous class”. Marx had had the proletariat; now the most important class in the modern economy was, Standing argued, the precariat, the millions of people working in short-term, casual, precarious jobs. It was a brilliant term, and a powerful...

New Zealand should be taking a leadership role in international efforts to promote open and transparent government, Dr Michael Macaulay said in a talk to the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies. Macaulay, the institute’s incoming director, attended a recent Asia-Pacific Summit for the Open Government Partnership, which was launched in 2011 with eight...

Progress on a new global treaty on climate change will happen through countries making voluntary pledges instead of signing up to mandated emissions cuts, according to Dr Christina Hood of the International Energy Agency. Giving a lecture to the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Hood said the next big step in international climate...